0473 | Vlad Bustiuc

Hi, this is Vlad bushcuk. I'm the CEO of Nova Media Marketing and you're listening to EA Interviews.

EA interviews, episode 473, inspiration, transformation, success stories and the imperfect action round. Seven days a week. Join Mario Ficcini for today's Expert Authority Effect interview. Finally. I love the intro, but I almost cut that short because I'm so excited to get Vlad on screen here. You know, I love talking about publishing. You know, I got my new book, but we are going to be talking about how to increase book sales. I have none other than Vlad Bustiak on today's episode. And he's helped his clients generate millions of dollars in sales. He has some unique approaches to it. We're talking. I don't want to say anything more. I just want to get him up here. But he's awesome. I'm going to bring him up right after we thank our sponsor. Every business needs a book, including yours. And that's why I'm launching my new book to help you regardless of where you think your current writing abilities are. Visit eapublishing method book.com today to learn the seven steps to publish and promote your nonfiction lead and profit generating business book in eight weeks. Once again, that's EA publishing method book.com Here he is, ladies and gentlemen, all the way from Transylvania, Vlad Bustiak. Vlad, how are you doing today?

Pretty good, thanks for having me.

I am super excited to talk book ads in book sales with you. So why is it so important to.

Even be concerned about it? Isn't the job done once you're done writing the book?

Right. So that's a great question. I think every author or even a business that, that publishes a book, in order for it to be successful, it needs readers. Right? So I work mainly with authors and they need, in order for them to be authors, they need consistent sales, they need consistent readers to come in and keep reading their books. Like the first book or second, you.

Tell me that if someone writes a book, it doesn't just keep selling automatically once it's, once it's out.

Well, I wish that was the case. And I've noticed that it's a, it's present in the marketplace today. It's presented like, oh, go ahead and publish your book and then you become an author. But that's just the 10% of it, like pushing a book out. And then it comes the hard part where you have to understand, okay, how do I attract the readers who are my readers? Right. Like that's a very common question that people actually are Trying to figure out after they publish the book, which is more of a question that you have to ask yourself before publishing a book.

Why don't, why don't you think more people start with that? Do you think they just don't know? No one told them or. It seems pretty common sense to me.

Well, I've noticed most authors or people that publish a book or read a book, they go about it very about themselves, where they just sit down and start writing something and they let the inspiration come in and they create something that they put all their creativity into it and they think it's great and it could be great. The problem comes when none of the things that you said, and it could be the things that you said are great, but the way you presented it or the way you put it into your book is not really appealing to the market that you're trying to attract. So before publishing a book, you have to be concerned with what do those people want? What is their problem?

And then you have to write a book based on those specific needs in order to serve them best, because otherwise you're just kind of doing it for yourself and not actually for the reader. So it's not in. In the reader's interest to do it by just writing whatever you want. So I think there's a lot of research that has to go into writing a book if you want it to. To sell. Right. So the better you do the research, the easier it's going to be for you to sell the book, Whether that's going to be even with organic sales or with marketing, like ads or just organic content, whatever it may be.

So what I'm hearing is before you even start the book, identify your target market.

Yeah, so that's the ideal, the ideal scenario. There are markets where there is such a big demand, where people, you know, there are some cases where people are just passionate about the right market where there's a lot of demand and they just go in and they start writing and it works. Right. But those are like, not, not everyone gets to write in the right markets. Some people do, but then it could kind of be luck for some people. But if you go about it this way, the chances of you having a successful book are pretty low. So you have to understand who are the readers that you're serving. You know, what are their favorite books, what other books have they. Did they read, what didn't they like about those books and then create a product that's better. Yeah, exactly. Like, and then it actually solves the problem that they're looking for to solve and maybe the books before them, they didn't actually solve the problems that you could be serving. So you're kind of missing out on, on pretty big, big opportunities there.

You're telling me that just because it's a book, it may not solve the problem you intended?

Well, of course it's a book though.

It's got to be official because it's a book. It's not the weird Internet.

Well, it sounds good. You know, like if you're saying you're a best selling author or you're an author or something like that, you, you hit like bestseller in a specific category on Amazon and you can call yourself a bestselling author, but like that's not very hard to attain. It sounds great, but it's, it's really not such a big deal. So.

There'S definitely a lot of research that you have to do before getting into writing a book. And then the main problem, I think that comes with this, if you don't do the research, then you're going to have a hard time. You're going to lose a lot of money advertising it or trying to promote it and think the ads are not right, or the video content is not right, or the materials, the copy and so on is not right. But in reality you're getting all this friction when you're trying to sell. And it's not because of the, the, the marketing. It's, it's really because based on how you position yourself on the market, right, you can be selling the same book, but if you position yourself accordingly to what the market wants and it could be just the description of the book or the title or even the COVID like that can make a huge difference. And we had cases like this where, you know, we sold I think 400, 000 worth of one book. And initially when we tried to sell it, it wasn't selling and it was because it was positioned wrong in the market. We had a very different cover than what the market wanted. It had a very, very different description than what the market wanted. And the marketing was the same. Like we tried everything in terms of advertising and then when we said, okay, maybe it's, it's the COVID that's wrong, right? Because those are things that people think in the last, the last step of this whole thing, that's when they, when, when nothing works, that's when you start thinking about those things and accepting the fact that maybe you didn't do the right things when it comes to the product and getting those things on point. In the beginning could save you a lot of time and a lot of money.

So there's this old adage, never judge a book by its cover. Have you heard that?

Yeah, of course, of course.

Do you think it applies to book publishing.

Or do you think you absolutely should judge the book by its coverage?

I wish it didn't, but the reality is people do judge the book by its cover. And it's not that they judge it, but they associate it, right? Like that's what they're doing. Because that's one thing that we've noticed. Like every time we, we would, we try to sell a book and we notice that it's not really selling, we would just analyze the market and try and figure out like, who's the best selling book in this genre. Like what's the best book that sold for the longest periods of time. And it's dominating everything. And then what we did is like, we redid the covers and then we tried to make it similar to that so that people instantly associated our book with a book that they probably already read or they recognize as, as a, as a top book.

Do you have some special way to split test covers?

I mean, there's definitely ways to, to split test that. We actually don't do it as much. We used to do it before, but then we kind of got, we got the hang of it. But what, what you can do like you can offer like free chapters of this book and you can do an ebook, right? So you can offer like an exclusive chapter or the first two, three chapters for free. And you can put it on a landing page. And then on this landing page you can have your cover, right? So you can have multiple landing pages with different colors.

So you're not saying necessarily on Amazon or Barnes and Noble, you're just saying test it out and get feedback beforehand.

You can do it, you can do it before or you can do it even on Amazon. We didn't really split test things on, on Amazon or. And the reason for this is because those platforms, they don't usually like you to make a lot of changes. Like when you get, like when you make a change, then they kind of reset your algorithm, right? And if you keep making those, those changes, they don't usually like. So they kind of like consistent things and things that work. And ideally you either do a good job in the beginning or you can do those split tests off the platform, right? And then you can track like the cost per purchase or the cost per day.

They don't want you to use them as the playground or the Testing the sandbox, I should say.

Yeah, yeah, for the sandbox. Not really, because what you're doing, like every platform has an algorithm, Right. And if you're messing this up, like you're putting a bad cover, that's just going to add up to your bad sport, and you don't want that. Like, you want to go there and show that you have a good product. And if you show that to the algorithm, the algorithm is going to push it up and it's going to give you the extra visibility that you need.

Yeah, it's. It's so important to do that. And the landing pages, like you were saying, is a great way to do it because you're in full control of it.

Exactly.

And, you know, there's nothing saying you can't ask people, show people, run contest, put them on a thing where they can actually grade it. I mean, there's a. One of my favorites. Do you guys use heat maps also, like, for a normal website?

Yeah, we do.

It's another way. So if someone doesn't want to test out the COVID and they don't want to do, like, what if they already have a cover, already have a manuscript, and they're like, okay, I, it's. It's already published. I just want to market it. Do you like it when people are already four or five steps down the road, or do you prefer going, okay, we're going to get you going the right way from the beginning.

Um, to be honest, sometimes, I mean, the, the way we do it is we start the ads right away. We don't do it at a big budget. Right. So we just start testing things out and then we identify if there's actually a problem or not. So it could be the ads in the beginning, but then if we, we do adjustments to the ads and we do ads that we know that run and the, the book still doesn't sell, then we obviously have a problem on the page. We have a problem either on the COVID either the title, or either the description. Right. And then the only way to really identify if you have a problem with the COVID is to actually run ads and see if it's working. If it doesn't work, then you clearly have a problem.

But if it's very obvious, right. Like, you still have to do, like, there's cases where it's very obvious that your cover is off. Right. You just do a, like a market research.

Most of, most of the ones out there on places.

Yeah. And you can see, like, you can see if, if your covers is really off, it's pretty easy to tell, but like it's, it's not that hard. Like if it's. The thing that I see is there's groups of authors and they create a cover and they post it and then they say like guys, what do you think about my cover? And there's a bunch of authors that are not really selling books and they're giving advice on how to, you know, change this book. And they're, they're very.

Like in love with the idea of the COVID and they have their own ideas of what should be on the COVID but they really don't ask themselves. Like.

Yeah, that's actually gonna sell and what makes it sell? Like that's the question. Like what makes this. Do you think? Like most authors, they, they think that the books, they have to include something that's inside of the book and then it has to be there. Like some weird elements that you find at page 300. Right. Like someone would have to read the book and then the COVID would make sense versus just make a cover that's appealing, that helps get attention to the book and get people to click and use that to get attention versus the other way. Which authors are doing like they're putting things that are in the book and then people have to read the book to understand the COVID which makes no, no sense. Like it's the completely the other way around.

I love that you're talking about that because.

As authors we are close to the material. Maybe too close, but done properly. That's why the books work and they don't sound like everyone else that's just kicking them out.

However.

You'Re absolutely right. If you have some weird element that you're not going to get till you're 300 pages in, you also are assuming it was good enough from pages one to 299 that they're even going to get to page 300.

Yeah.

If they don't now the whole thing's blown. So do you have any. Here's the top three to five things. Like when you're designing a cover, you want to use like a specific font colors, obviously. I'll count the one you just said because I do like it. Don't use some random thing from page 300. But are there other things you look for? Like how do you know?

How do you design a best selling cover? There we go.

Right. So this is a pretty easy process. Like all you have to do is go in your niche, in your genre, whatever. If you sell self development or marketing books, like find the best books that Sold that have the most reviews, sold the best. Right. Find, like the first three, five, doesn't matter, and line them up and then create a cover that has. You're going to see they usually have like seven similar fonts, similar color tones, similar, you know, like, composition. Right. Whether it's like a blank, like just colors, very simple, or it's maybe a landscape. And then text over. Like, you have to understand what's the standard in your genre in the bestselling ones. Like, you don't have to look. It doesn't matter what you like. Maybe you're looking at a book and you think, oh, this book's great. I'm sure that it sells. You don't want to look at books that don't sell. You don't want to copy or mimic books that don't sell. You want to look at the ones that sell the best and then create a cover that's very similar to that. And what that means is color tones, similar concepts, and then similar fonts as well. Big fonts, clear fonts. Obviously has to be clear. The contrast needs to be on point. So it has to be very easy to read. Because on most platforms, you're seeing the books in very small formats. Right? Like, they're very small. So it's important that the text is easy to read and the colors stand out. And you also want to go with colors that are pretty mainstream. Right. So you don't want to do any weird color combinations like green and red. I have this in my background. You don't want to do this usually. Like, you just want to go with. And you can analyze, like, movie posters. Right? Like, they may.

I was just going to bring those up.

Yeah, they're blue and red. There's like, this typical things that sell. If you're looking at a movie, try to analyze the colors in the movie. They use colors that are pleasant to the eye and attract the eye and stimulate the eye. Like, that's the things that you want to do as well. You don't want to go against it and then be so different that it's weird. Your cover looks weird because then people are going to think, this is really not the type of book I read. I typically read because it doesn't look like this. Like, that's what they're thinking. This book is different. It's not in my. It's not what I read usually. So you're basically putting readers away by being too different. So you want to be, you know, creative in it, but you still have to have some sort of Guidelines that are acceptable to, you know, to your marketplace.

Love that you're bringing it up. You may have noticed the color chart I had before we got started because we do grade stuff and I love that you mentioned it. For anyone who doesn't know, in films, when they like the Matrix, it's all green. Other movies, it's blue, they do it for tonality. And you absolutely should be doing it for book covers as well.

I think it's a great point because there's so many people that go, I want it to be unique, I want it to be different, but there's a reason that this stuff sells. So is there any, is there anything else that is like a game changer that you should be doing or do you have a certain level of. You want to make it yours, but as long as you're following that, you're fine?

Well, I would advise any author to work with a professional graphic designer, and I would advise them not to be too controlling over them because they usually know those things. Like, they usually know that the things that are pleasant to the eye and the most mistakes I've seen is they come in and they completely take control over everything and they try to overcrowd, like, the space, you know, like put in too many texts or too many things or too many elements. Yeah. The car should be simple and there should be only one point of focus. Like, your eye should just go straight to a point. It shouldn't be like multiple ones because then it's going to be like, it's not really going to make sense. So try to stay like a little bit out of the process and let's let the graphic designer kind of do their thing and then ask for advice from other people and try to be as objective as possible. The worst thing you can do is try to make, make it based on what you like. Unless you're a graphic designer or an expert in covers, you know, don't take your advice.

I would even, even argue to step back from that. I say it in my book because even if your background is this, this, this, this, and this, you're still too, I, I feel you're still too close to it to be objective.

True, that. That's very. Especially, like when you're the author and you're the one, it's your baby, you know, like it's your book cover, then the urge to take control and make it the way you want is very high. And yeah, that's why you need, like, someone else to kind of. That you can trust that they're going to, you know, make the best decision for, for the book. Like, you definitely need some.

Would you say it's fair to say just because you like it, it might be stupid and not beneficial to your overall goals?

Yeah, for sure, for sure. Like, there's a lot of authors that are not selling any books that are very happy with how their cover looks like. Right. And that should tell you now, a.

Couple of my designers were like, do you trust us? I'm like, yes. They're like, are you going to leave this alone? I'm like, can I have another day or two? And then I did. I threw my fit. And then we let it go.

So I have to ask you online and offline.

Should you be focusing on only online covers or do you want to compensate for offline sales too?

I think it should be. I mean, first of all, you have to ask yourself, like, where do the majority of your book sales are going to come from? Like, that's the first question. And then if it's obviously offline sales, then there's your answer. Like, you have to optimize for that. If it's on all platforms, then you have to optimize for something that fits both on the Kindle device as well as a cover. And on the Kindle device, you have to be aware that usually they see it in black and white. So you have to put your cover in black and white, make sure there's enough contrast, make sure that there's, you know, like, that the font and the text is easy to, to. To understand and it can separate from the background. Like, that's, that's pretty important. So it's just like I would say that those are basic things that you have to kind of check before and optimize for your. Your market, like, understand where you're going to sell the books, whether that's e books or audiobooks or maybe it's paperbacks or hardcovers, and then you optimize for that.

Now, I want to do a caveat on a previous question. I know you said don't get too creative on the covers for online and just selling in general, but if you are optimizing more for offline sales when it's in someone's hand, would you say you have a little bit more leeway with the creativity ness, even if it doesn't appear as well in the thumbnail?

And I'll give you an example. So like serif fonts versus sans serif.

Sans serif. I always tell everyone, for a cover, don't have little curly cues and all that. Because podcast artwork, too. So many people have podcast artwork. It's like you're on a phone. That thing is literally. Where do you think the name thumbnail came from? It's this big. You're not seeing 80% of what's on there. So do you think you have a little bit more leeway with offline sales or just stick with what works and don't even try to get creative if 80% of sales are offline?

Well, I would just. Yeah, I would just stick with what works. Like, I wouldn't really. I don't see how the offline, like, if you're meaning, like, when people go and buy a book in the library. Is that what you mean?

Yeah. Or if they're selling it, I'm thinking, like, at a business event in the back of the room. If they could care less about online sales and they just are going to sell it to their audience in person.

I mean, I think it's kind of the same principles. I don't see how things change.

Yeah, you don't want it to look bad either way.

Yeah, it just has to. Like, the same principles still apply whether it's online or offline or in a library. Like, books are the same. Yeah.

Very good, Very good. So we have a little bit of time left, but I got to ask you about the. So we talked about the pre. Preempting and doing stuff while you're working on it. Tell me about the. Okay, my stuff's done. Now how do you get me more sales? Like, it's already on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, all these places. Like, what are the best ways you found? Like, you had mentioned some paid ads and different things earlier. What are the best ways or combination of best ways you found to increase sales for existing books that are live?

All right, so the first thing is you have to understand where your audience is spending time. And there's authors that are in a place where they have an email list where they can just squeeze them. And that's what we do when we start working with a new author. We just send them a quiz to send to the list. And then we ask them, like, where do you spend most of the time? And, you know, they'll say, like, Facebook or maybe TikTok or maybe YouTube or whatever the platform is. Like, we're trying to understand it, and then just go ahead and advertise on those platforms. And we also ask them, like, how do you find out about new books? And they will say, like, browsing Amazon, which means Amazon ads. Or I saw an ad on Facebook, which means Facebook ads. Or I saw you know like a video on TikTok which means TikTok ads or TikTok organic content. So you have to.

And it could be LinkedIn or YouTube for that matter. To Instagram.

Yeah, yeah, whatever the audience is telling you, like that's what you should do. We did make the mistake where a client said like no, I really want to go on TikTok. And we did. We invested a lot of time and resource into building you know like 100k following account. And then we did the quiz and like we were not really selling anything on TikTok. And then we found out like, okay, this audience is clearly not on TikTok. We just grew the wrong audience there and we put in all this time. So first is like understanding where your audience is spending time and then it's just a matter of creating the ads to reach out to them on the given platform. So if it's Facebook then going ahead and doing that with Facebook ads. And.

On the ad side it's. And I'll get into the Amazon which is going to be a very interesting topic because there's. Things work very differently there. There's more options for, for authors to sell their book. But on Facebook it's it really important that you understand how they, you know, their search terms. What do they go ahead and type in on Amazon or like Bars and Noble, like what are the search terms that, that pop up? How do they go and find a book that's similar to yours? What do they type in? And then you want to use the same keywords and integrate those in your ad copy because when they see that ad they will instantly think that this is what I usually type and then this is what I'm actually getting. So you're coming in front of them with something that they would type in and that, that makes them think that you have what they want. So that makes a very huge difference. And the same thing, those keywords need to be present in your book description as well. Right. Because that gives them.

Yeah, the metadata.

Yeah, that gives them like, okay, this is what I'm looking for. This is what I'm getting. Right. If they read a self help book, make sure that you mention that it's a, you know, they need to know. And there's, even though this is seems like common sense, I've seen a lot of authors that don't actually do this and what happens is those, those platforms would. If you have the wrong keywords or if you don't have the right keywords, Then they will associate your books with other books that have similar keywords, right? So you want to make sure that the keywords that are present in the bestselling books are also present into your descriptions because then they will associate that with the other bestselling books and they will put it into the also pots or similar series or similar books. And that, that's how, how the platform works. And if you don't have them, then they will do their best to associate you with something else. Right. And sometimes you may end up in the wrong categories or associated with the wrong type of books and that will create a very negative spiral because your book's going to be put in front of the wrong readers. The wrong readers are not going to buy your book and then that's going to, you know, add up to your score as a negative. And then your book is not going to be allowed to climb in ranks and it's going to be marked as a, as a bad book. And obviously all the platforms, they want to push good content, right? And if your content is, is marked as bad content, it's just you're going.

To be pushing it as much if at all.

You're not going to have the, the benefit of the algorithm.

So is it safe to say nowadays that you think the algorithm and their softwares and the AI and all these different things are really doing much of the heavy lifting until there's an issue and you talk to support, maybe then it actually goes to a real person.

We've seen cases where books were like shadow banned or something like this, and then we had to speak to a representative. So if you're seeing like really bad numbers, it might be worth, sometimes it might be worth talking to, to a rep. And they will usually tell you like, okay, this book has been flagged for this reason. And then we'll remove again. It would, you know, it would perform better.

Yeah, I think a lot of people think just because they, you know, because you put a lot of time, energy and money to make your book good. And I think a lot of people don't realize just because you uploaded it on Amazon, they just, I don't know specifics, but it feels like they just have this thing going around checking all the books coming in on a daily basis. Same thing as with YouTube. I mean, how many videos do they get on a daily basis? And they're like, well, why isn't it working? Why isn't this, this, this? It's like no one might, in that company might not know exist till you talk to support or anything. You're just a number at that point. You know what I mean? So I was curious what you thought, like, with the metadata especially, because I've seen some weird stuff too. And it's like, how the heck is it in this category for this? And it's like, there's no way a human would have done this. I mean, this is common sense.

Yeah, yeah, definitely that's the case. And you have to pay attention to those things. There are cases where. But that's the thing is like, if you do the right things when you publish the book, it will put your book in the right categories. If you don't, then the algorithm is going to do their best to put you in the, you know, like what they think is the right category. And one thing that you can do to kind of make sure that you don't end up in those, those wrong categories is to mention the main keywords multiple times. So we've, we've studied successful books and what they do is they, they meant like, this is, it's a psychological trailer. Just going to give this example. We've noticed, like in a book description, they mention it like five or six times. And then you look at a book that doesn't sell and it's mentioned maybe once, maybe if, if, if at all. And then it doesn't sell. And we, we did tests where a guy was like running ads to this book and it wasn't really selling. And we thought maybe it's the ads. And then we, we checked the description, we looked at the description. We clearly, we looked at the, the biggest competitor and then his book. And we clearly saw that his book wasn't really mentioning what the book is about. Right. Like, what is it actually about? And then we said, okay, you got to mention those keywords in the book. And then when he did, the ad started working. It was the same ads, the same targeting, the same copy. Nothing was changed just because he made it clear. Then it started changing. And then also the, the algorithm shifts as well. Right. Because they see that readers that buy this specific book end up buying your book. And then the also bots are going to start changing. Right. So that's how they function. Yeah.

And it's reminded me a lot of just SEO for websites and everything else in general, because I remember and I still think it's true. I'd have to talk to our SEO coach, but it used to be when you bought a domain with the keywords in it, you automatically get like this huge bump. Same thing as, like the title of the Book and then the meta description and the number of Times. I know LinkedIn is the same way. Our SEO, our LinkedIn coach, told us that about. Same thing. LinkedIn's a search engine. When you put stuff into that, I mean, if you only have it one times and the number one person in that category has it three, all you have to do is add it four or five.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, that's. I don't know about you, but I think it. I think you find it exciting. I find it exciting. But if you're listening, I hope to God you find it exciting, because this. It's not rocket science. Just do more. It's not rocket science. So I want to ask you, who's your biggest success story?

So we had. I'm not going to be able to share the name.

That's cool. But where were they at and where'd you take them to?

Right. So we started. This was an author. She was writing actually fiction. And she started from zero.

And we managed to scale her to, I think we did $11 million in five years. So we took it from zero. She published the first book. We had problems where we had. This book wasn't really selling for four months. We didn't really know what to do. Then we went to the covers. We understand that, okay, the COVID really needs to fit in. And all those things that we just talked about, keywords, all those things, we. We got it. I think it took us kind of like three to four months to understand everything and optimize it. And then the same book, the same product that wasn't selling in the beginning, ended up selling, you know, $10 million worth of books.

Wow. And that's just straight books, nothing else.

Yeah, straight books. And mainly this is for ebooks. And it took a lot of time. But the biggest thing is the first. The first year, I think. So the first four months was. Were the hardest. And then what we learned is a prime period of two years. So in the first two years when a book is published, it has a prime period where you are able to advertise the most and make the most money. After years, this usually drops. And you will find that almost any author will find that a book will drop after two years because newer series or books have priority over older books. And they give you two years. And in those two years, you want to make the most out of it, because what you're doing is you're actually growing a readership. You're growing a base of people that read your books, and you want to make sure that you take the advantage of this because the way we did is like we sold this book and then the readers bought other books as well. Right. And that's how you actually grow a base of readers, by selling a lot of books. And you need to understand when's the right time because people maybe publish a book and didn't. Don't really, they don't really do anything. Right. They don't start advertising or they just leave it. Yeah.

They might wait six or 12 months when really you should be doing it before, if you ask me.

Yeah. And they're losing all this precious time and the algorithm on your side in the beginning. And that's why you have to make the most out of, out of the first, the first two years. First year ideally is the best. And then the second year is still going to work. And then after the second year you.

Better have a new edition or an update.

Yeah. And then. But you still have to, you're kind of always against a battle of, of your book being pushed down. Like that's kind of the battle that we're always fighting every day. Like we are just fighting to keep the books at the same pace or increase them, but we're against something that's pushing the books down. And there is ways to kind of combat this. Right. So always running ads. Like that's, that's number one. Always invest in ads, understand what works, and then once you understand what works, keep doing it. Even though if you're maybe losing a little bit of money on the book that you're advertising, keep doing it. Because then in the long term, if you're planning on publishing more books, you're going to make more money. And another way that we found this was recent. We made a partnership with Amazon and most people don't know this, but there's a service that Amazon provides to big publishers or big names and they have specific type of ads that are only available to them. So this type of ads, it's not available to the, the mass public. And we were offered this, this service, we tried it out and it was crazy. Like it was super crazy. As soon as the ads were turned on, the sales just skyrocketed. Like. And this was an old book, it was like four years old. Right. So we were kind of making two. We're barely making 200 a day. We turn on the ads from them. From them. And then the book started making $400 a day. And this is like on a four year old book. Yeah, on a four year book. This is very difficult to make. Like I could try whatever I want. I knew that my daily revenue was capped at 200 because the book is old. And then they came in with those because they have like guaranteed placements.

How did they just find you or do you sign up? What's this?

So they reached out to us for this big offer that we, we work with and they offer the services because they offer contract like the minimum contract is $50,000 for four months of spend. Like that's the minimum that you can do with them. And they offer this, the, the, the contract to us. So they reached out. They usually reach out. You can really get in touch with them.

So you're talking 10 or 12 grand a month ad spend. Yeah, minimum. And were you doing that prior to. Or were you at five or six a month and then what were you at prior to them reaching out to you?

So on Amazon ads, we were spending between 10,000 to just our Amazon ads that we can, we have access, we're spending like 10,000 to 15,000 per month. And then on Facebook side we're spending like $50,000. We're spending actually a lot. And the thing was that we were competing with their best clients. Yeah. We're kind of in their placements and that's how we kind of ended up on their radar. And then they. The services to, to us as well. That's cool. Yeah. Then we, then we did a. We build a relationship with them and we managed to get a deal where we could offer those services to our clients at a lower entry point. Right. So Instead of spending 50,000, you can join in under our umbrella and then you can do minimum of 10,000 or 15,000, depending on the, the placement that you're using. So that way we can offer this service to other authors as well, not just the big names.

That's fantastic. Congratulations.

I can imagine getting an email or a call or however that worked out. That was probably something special and glad to hear it worked out. I have one more question for you and we're going to keep it on the books. What books would you recommend to Expert Authority World that have helped you?

Okay, so that's a great question. Books.

Like what books do you like.

To read that have helped over the years for business or life?

To be honest.

Even though I sell books, I don't read a lot of books.

Okay, well, I appreciate the honesty. Yeah.

Yeah. So I don't read a lot of books and I think.

What about audiobooks?

Well, I would have to check my, my, my thing is not the books that I listen to. They're not really.

I think, sell like crazy. It's a. It's a good book. Like, that's a really good book that you can understand. It talks about creating a business product, then we'll sell. And it's things that we talk about. Right. So they're saying, like, build a business. Understand the need, and then do, you know, build a business. And the same principles apply to a book. Right. And that's like, I would say the biggest thing that, that kind of impacted what we're doing and once I read that book is like, okay, first you have to understand, like, identify the market. A market where there's a big potential to sell. Identify the market and then create a product based on what they want. And that's exactly what we did. Because you can do this for a business and you can do this for a book.

Yeah.

And what we did is like, I went on with the chief editors, with the clients that I work with, and I went on with them and we had a talk and I did, okay, like, here's the market research. If we wanna. If we wanna sell a lot of books, we need to create books according to those markets. Because there's a lot of authors that they just write whatever they want. And what that does is it gives me a very hard, hard job. Like, it's. It's much harder for me to sell a book.

Because you don't know if it's gonna sell or not. You want to.

Exactly.

And I just, like you said, research the market first.

Yeah. And I'm saying those are the things that sell in this market. Create a book and make sure that you include those things. You can be creative, you can say whatever you want, but make sure that those things are there. Because if they're there, I can leverage them in the marketing. We can put them cover, we can mention them in the description, you know, and once you understand those things, it's.

Going to be core structure.

Exactly. It's the foundation that you're. You're building the book. Because that's something that I've. I had the.

Looking back, I also published some books as well. And initially when I started, like, I just hired some. Some writers from. From upwork, I remember. And because I knew the market and I knew what sells, I just told them, like, just write a book about this. This is, you know, like, write it about. And I knew that those things sell. And they did sell. And then I hired the.

Book production manager for one of my clients. It was like a. A few million dollars per year. So she was Creating the books for a like 2, $3 million per year publishing business. And I just let her write the books based on what she wanted.

You just let her take over it, huh?

Yeah. And then the problem was because they're not really concerned with what sales like they're just coming up with new ideas and things like this.

And yeah, I've noticed there's some people who focus so much on the content, they're not worried about the sales or marketing. It's why I was excited to talk to you about it. And then there's other people so focused on the sales and marketing. It's like, great, you just sold a million copies of this book. But is the book worth reading? So your comment early on about the don't bury, you know, don't have a cover that relates to something only in page 300 for it to make sense. Yeah, 100%. You got to think through this. I tell people all the time the COVID is gonna, the COVID is gonna get their interest. The back cover is gonna get them to read it in chapter one. Better keep them hooked, otherwise they're never gonna finish it, you know?

Exactly.

So I appreciate everything you've been sharing with us and I think this was great. I can't wait to dive in more and learn, dive in more with some of the stuff you mentioned. But thanks so much for sharing.

Was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

All right, Expert Authority World. We have another great episode here today. I'll see you on the next one. Have a great day and God bless. You're already the expert, but have you transformed your expertise into a tangible asset that will generate qualified leads while increasing profit for you 24, 7 and if so, how well are you promoting it? With my new book, the Expert Authority Effect Publishing Method, I take you through my process step by step. Visit eapublishingmethodbook.com today to learn the seven steps to publish and promote your nonfiction, lead and profit generating business book. In eight weeks. Visit eapublishingmethodbook.com to get started. Now, once again, that's eapublishingmethodbook.Com thanks for listening to today's episode. I would love to know what you enjoyed most from it if you haven't done so already. I invite you to connect with me on my new LinkedIn. You can go to it directly at eainterviews.com LinkedIn Once again, that's eainterviews.com LinkedIn lastly, check out the full eainterviews.com site for complete show notes, the full interview video experience, links to the resources we mentioned, and more. Have a blessed day and I'll see you on the next one.